[tei-council] Electing a TEI Technical Council Chair for next year.

Tue Oct 29 18:03:56 EDT 2013

In general I think it would be nice to have a formal procedure since
we cannot foresee if future composition of the Council could generate
conflict (I guess not, but...), especially if there is more than one
candidate.

In my opinion

1) the person who organise and act as the scrutineer can be the the
senior member (better than the current Chair since in theory he will
have less conflicts of interests) if he is not standing for election;
otherwise the Council can ask the Board to designate a member for that
role.

2) direct mail is a viable solution to express votes, since the
votings members are only 11, but also a doodle can work. We can avoid
(or reduce) spamming keeping it open for just one or two days and
giving the link in this mailing list only one day before.

But if there is only one candidate and all the Council members feel
fine with him (or more formally if no member of the Council explicitly
ask for the voting procedure)  I agree with Hugh, we can proceed by
acclamation. And finally, I am even less competent than Hugh, so I
will not stand for election :-)

Fabio

2013/10/29 Hugh Cayless <philomousos at gmail.com>:
> Given the current makeup of the Council, I don't see any reason to build in conflict resolution mechanisms ahead of time. We might just make it a policy that in the case of a disputed/contentious election, the Council will ask the Board to supply a returning officer. Is there any reason direct email to that individual cannot constitute a vote?
>
> We should probably also figure out whether anyone besides James wants to run (I certainly don't feel competent to after only a year on Council). If not, I think you might just win by acclamation. :-)
>
> Hugh
>
> On Oct 29, 2013, at 14:00 , James Cummings <James.Cummings at it.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>>
>> I have no problem with the current board representative (Lou)
>> doing this, or Sebastian who also volunteered as a returning
>> council member. (My only worry is that both of them may be seen
>> as being related to Oxford... but well what can you do.)
>>
>> I think everyone getting doodle logins would be problematic, just
>> the kind of complication I think we want to avoid.  If we put the
>> link publicly on the tei-council mailing list, then yes, anyone
>> in the world could fill in Martin Holmes as the name, and vote
>> for me. But if there are *two* Martin Holmes who have voted then
>> presumably the person acting as returning officer will notice
>> that and email Martin and say "Oi! Did you vote twice, or who do
>> you really want to vote for?" Or something like that.  i.e. it is
>> only a problem if someone out there does try to do something
>> nasty and someone who should vote doesn't vote. (And we should
>> make it an assumption that all  2014 council members *should* vote.)
>>
>> I can see that who voted for who maybe should remain secret, with
>> just totals given.
>>
>> Any additional, dissenting or agreeing, thoughts? New Council
>> members, how would you want it to work?
>>
>> -James
>>
>> On 29/10/13 17:40, Martin Holmes wrote:
>>> I think this needs to be an electronic poll, because we can't assume
>>> we're ever going to be able to all meet in person. I see no objection to
>>> Doodle, assuming we don't think impersonation would be an issue. Perhaps
>>> we should all be required to get Doodle logins and make these available
>>> to the organizer ahead of time, so the poll could be limited to those
>>> users, rather than the open system we use for meeting times where we
>>> just fill in our names.
>>>
>>> The person to organize it could perhaps be the board representative, who
>>> is non-voting, so would presumably be the most objective of us.
>>> Alternatively, the organizer could be the outgoing Chair _except_ when
>>> that person is standing again, in which case it could be the board rep.
>>>
>>> I'm not sure about transparency of voting. With the current Council
>>> membership I can't imagine any conflict arising, but we should perhaps
>>> plan on the basis that future Councils might be more contentious than we
>>> are now, so perhaps who voted for who should be secret.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Martin
>>>
>>> On 13-10-29 10:10 AM, James Cummings wrote:
>>>> Dear TEI Technical Council,
>>>>
>>>> As you know in its desire to become more fully transparent and
>>>> representative body the TEI Consortium has moved to being wholly
>>>> elected and removed the position of institutional 'partners' on
>>>> the TEI Board.  Although I was originally elected to the Council
>>>> for the last year I've been 'Appointed' by the Board and I was
>>>> eager to do away with appointed positions and because the bylaws
>>>> were changing stood for election and was re-elected.
>>>>
>>>> One of the tasks for the incoming TEI Technical Council for 2014
>>>> is to elect itself a chair as per the description at:
>>>> http://www.tei-c.org/About/bylaws.xml#body.1_div.3_div.3 which
>>>> says that:
>>>>
>>>> "The Chair of the Technical Council shall be elected by the
>>>> voting Members of the TEI-C Technical Council from its membership
>>>> and shall serve as the chief technical officer of the Consortium.
>>>> If no Technical Council Member is able or willing to assume the
>>>> chair, the Technical Council may request the Board of Directors
>>>> to second one of its elected members to the role, or it may
>>>> nominate a non-elected individual."
>>>>
>>>> The bylaws are intentionally vague on *how* we do this since they
>>>> wanted to leave it in control of the Council and Board to sort
>>>> themselves out and not be required to use any particular election
>>>> method. I would be interested in Council (new, returning, and
>>>> departing) coming to at least a vague consensus of how they think
>>>> this should take place.
>>>>
>>>> I believe that we should have the election _before_ the end of
>>>> the year so that the new chair can start sorting out things for
>>>> next year, that we want a simple procedure (since we'll be
>>>> repeating this each year). I'm in favour of it being as open as
>>>> possible, but perhaps not until after the last vote is counted
>>>> (since we don't want one person's vote to influence others)?
>>>>
>>>> Things I guess we need to know:
>>>> - Who from the new/returning group wishes to stand for election?
>>>> (I can tell them more about what it is like) I'm intending to
>>>> stand but equally don't want to discourage others if they are
>>>> keen to do it.
>>>>
>>>> - Would something like a 'hidden poll' on Doodle be sufficient,
>>>> if the results (should it be who voted for who or just aggregate
>>>> numbers?) were posted publicly on the mailing after? An example
>>>> of one of those might look like
>>>> http://www.doodle.com/a9fqvskmq5mxexqn Would that be good enough?
>>>>
>>>> - We need someone to act as the person to organise things (e.g.
>>>> the poll) and while I'd usually suggest this be the current
>>>> Council Chair I think there is a perceived conflict of interest
>>>> if someone intending to stand does this. (I'd be honest,
>>>> ya'know...of course, but it is about perception ;-) ) This could
>>>> be anyone on Council, but maybe someone from the existing Council
>>>> who is not returning? Or two people... etc.
>>>>
>>>> I'd be interested in anyone's thoughts. If we can come to a vague
>>>> consensus of _how_ you want it to work then I'll put it on the
>>>> TEI-Council-FAQ.
>>>>
>>>> -James
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings at it.ox.ac.uk
>> Academic IT Services, University of Oxford
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